The house addition begins.....

Friday was a busy day. We finally got our plans approved by Chatham County. They, at the last minute, needed a HVAC contractor to be listed on the permit eventhough I am taking full responsibility as an "Owner-Builder" and signed the statement that I have sufficient knowledge (with the help of Google) to perform each of the trades to code. Hey, we have been living the the "garage apartment" timber frame for 16 months and no timbers have fallen on our heads yet.

We are tripling the size of the place by adding about 2200 sq ft. Just a small addition. We are adding 3 bedrooms, taking away one to enlarge the current kitchen which will stay in the timber frame portion as a great room, adding a formal utility room or laundry (the w&d now reside in the garage which has never seen a car), two full baths, a study, a living room/galery space, a 2nd family room, a study and his and hers closets ..... oh and also a monster walk up attic with ceilings around 8-10 ft due to 2 massive shed dormers. I guess we are going big time.

We made a few different decisions this time:

1. stick frame it and not timber frame it since we want to be done a little quicker

2. we picked up Jeff for 6-12 months to help us full time and will bring in a few extra people from time to time

3. we decided to not do the full blown Gustav Stickley designed house that we had the full set of plans for and scale it back since we did not need all the space and we wanted to integrate the current structure into the grand scheme

4. do a little more finished look on the interior by using t&g souther yellow pine flooring on the second floor and quarter sawn oak trim in the main living area

We are sawing, drying and milling all the exposed wood (siding, trim, flooring, cabinetry, timber headers) on site using our fancy new shop (36x46 ft) that houses the saw mill, production planer, shaper etc.

Here is the hole we dug after one day of work. We have a lot of dirt but will use it to level out the lot since we have a decent slope.

More posts and pictures to come....